


The Unfolding of Color and the Start of the Universe

by IngeniumNoctuam



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Alternate Uinverse - Soulmates, Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Alternate Universe - Non-Magical, First Kiss, Fluff, Get Together, M/M, trans!remus
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-04-02
Updated: 2016-04-02
Packaged: 2018-05-30 18:38:49
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 16,485
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6435826
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/IngeniumNoctuam/pseuds/IngeniumNoctuam
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Remus Lupin just wants to read and eat chocolate and be left alone, until he drops his book and lands on one illustrious, and perhaps a little flustered, Sirius Black. They meet, worlds shift, and then in a rapid blink of an eye Sirius is gone. But not forever.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Unfolding of Color and the Start of the Universe

**Author's Note:**

> Soulmate AU where you see color when you first look into your soulmate's eyes.

Really, of course, it was the supple spring breeze that did it for him. At an age just reaching above ten, outstretched fingertips to teenagedom, the simple things in life like books and chocolate and cardboard boxes, all of which he could hide away in, were the peak of his small little life. The breeze, today, was the object of his whole hearted devotion. Under the shade of a tree his mother swore up and down was a veteran of World War I and II, Remus used his stumpy and slightly sticky fingers to flip the pages of his comically large book. The wind teasingly blew his hair into his eyes with a soft twinkle in its own eyes and off in the distance children his age shouted and screeched joyfully. 

Remus tuned their frequency out like he was a well built radio. He was used to this, this isolation, though less of a desolate and despairing kind and more of a homey, introspective kind, as the children who shouted always shouted the wrong name and used the wrong pronouns. He stumbled over words to try and stop them but in the end the short attention span of an adolescent doesn't reach beyond the fourth stuttered syllable. So there he was, definitely a he, no matter what the other children may or may not accidentally or on purpose call him. For hours he would have been contented to stay just like that, on his windowsill perch, leaving chocolate smudges on each turned page, letting the sun hum and skim over his skin, blissfully unaware of the universe of colors swarming around him like so many his age, but the book toppled off his lap in a horribly stereotypical performance of a dog rolling over. Had this not happened, as it was destined to, perhaps he would never have leapt completely out of the window and landed, with a shriek he would not be inclined to call feminine, on top of a little boy crouching below his house, chewing gum like a cowboy might chew tobacco.

"You scream like a girl," the boy said, much too calm and superior for a ten year old; a ten year old pinned down by another eleven year old at that. As a demeaning measure, to remind this boy of his place in the aging food chain, Remus stayed seated on the boys chest. He knew, of course, how hard and unrelenting the dirt must be below his back, but a part of him thought it was a discomfort the boy had probably never felt in all his pampered life and decided it was one which needed to be hard pressed into someone as clearly spoiled as him.

"Well I'm not," Remus countered. He glowered at the boys in a humorously sedated attempt at mirroring the glower his mother could pull on him so well when the gory remains of four chocolate chip cookies smeared his face and hands. He crossed his arms over his chest, refusing on premise to do the boy the favor of eye contact, instead jutting his chin to the side and hardening his features into stone.

"What?" The boy, crinkling his face like wrapping paper, squinted at his head, silvery irises narrowing, sharpening, like a blade. There was a slow dawning sense up superiority that was washing over Remus as he wriggled on the ribs below him, completely pinning a force Remus could just tell was usually so chaotic and lethal.

"A girl. I'm not a girl."

The boy seemed to give up seeing through the sun's glare to the eyes in front of him, and so he just flopped back on the grass with a much too exhausted for his years thud.

"I didn't doubt you for a minute mate," the boy drawled with slick and easy sarcasm. It rolled of his tongue in a way Remus, a young sarcasm prodigy himself, had to begrudgingly admit was smooth. For this reason, and perhaps a few more selfishly driven purposes, that made his heart sing in his chest and lit fires of hope in his stomach, Remus got off the boy and helped him to his feet. Dully, in the far reaches of an early childhood long tucked away and forgotten, Remus knew he was supposed to say something by way of greeting.

"I'm R-Remus," he mumbled directly to the crushed grass below his feet as if he were sustaining the conversation with the earth and not something as unobtainable as a boy speaking to him, him as in another boy. The tremor in his voice paralleled the tremor running along his spine in waves. His cheeks heated up and then, he was sure, the ruse would be up, the boy in front of him would scoff or stare bewildered or understand, now that Remus' head wasn't haloed in light, like all the other children seemed to understand. A bead of sweat Remus was sure didn't come from the heat rolled down his cheek as the boy just shrugged.

"Serious."

Remus wished he knew where his book had fallen. Wished he had, instead of protecting his pride, gotten up and crawled back inside, onto the armchair that had the cigarette sized holes with the singed edges, and let the sunlight tease him through the pane of a window. Worst yet he felt a tear surging to the brim of his eye.

"O-Of c-course I'm s-s-serious." His voice came out barely above a trill. His feet seemed inordinately small then, the whole of him actually, thin frame, narrow face, slender legs, scrawny—maybe that was what gave it away. His hair was getting long, maybe that was it. His eyelashes were sweeping and thick, like a girls, and his lips he thought were too pink, lips he swore would never see the end of a lipgloss tube if he ever had his say.

"No, that's my name, stupid."

Now, Remus had been called many things, but stupid had never been one of them. "Those with stupid names shouldn't call others stupid," Remus retorted in a rough approximation of an overly serious adult, a grin splitting his face, hands retreating from the safe darkness of his oversized pockets and their splitting seams, already tearing beneath his twitchy fingers. 

The boy, to his surprise, laughed, barking, almost mad, tossing his long black hair in the wind. The rough sound was so different from the airy, condescending voice from before, like the boy had been turned up full volume suddenly, deafening anyone listening.

"Hey, my parents are nutters. I like your name though. Your mum has good taste." Remus was given a wry smile and for the first time they made eye contact. 

It was like the explosion at the start of the universe, big, booming, all consuming, blasting from one focal point, those silver, no opaque blue, eyes, bursting to everything else. Art, Remus finally realized, may actually be worth looking at. The boy, Serious, looked dazed too, blinking rapidly his thin black eyelashes and darting his eyes around them as if seeing the world for the very first time. As their eyes adjusted to the light and new waves of color, word associations clicked in their brains: blue in the sky, more majestic than either realized—so much more wondrous than their parents had repeatedly explained in dreamy tones or analytical precision—green in the grass, rippling in the gold honey coating of the sun, and spots of things, oranges, yellows, reds, dotting the field around them like a wonderful Rorschach test. Things seemed to move in blurs, quickly, the flutter of wings became indistinguishable, the rustling of leaves dizzying, each blink a camera shutter, that would send a picture to a dark corner of the brains to be stored forever and looked at when the clouds were grey and the world devoid of such lovely color as there was now. 

And then, in a head spinning jumble of light, color, Serious quit examining the threading of his shirt and darted his eyes to Remus. Remus was only faintly aware of the barely present flutter of his heart as the eyes, so much more pale than the sky above, icy water or vapid pools Remus would later describe them as, roamed over him. Amidst the waves of new colors they both came to a startling realization all at once, hitting them full force in the chest and knocking the wind out of each of them.

"Soulmate," Serious whispered, breathlessly. 

Despite the pressing matter looming right in front of him, Remus couldn't help but realize the cover of his book peaking just above the tall grass. It was marvelously jovial with the characters shaded in ancient greens and blues and reds, the cracking words shimmering gold, rustic, archaic, magnificent. His mother had told him, no warned him, of the beauty of the world that was so entrancing. She herself spent impertinent amounts of time and money in art museums trying to absorb all the majestic splendor she could from each acrylic or watercolor. Staring at the cover of a measly children's book he had tossed around, today very literally, without a care for its value, Remus realized perhaps the world held more beauty than his eyes would ever adjust to.

"Do you see it too?" Serious pressed, shifting closer. When Remus looked up at the boy standing before him, christened in light and the leaves swirling above him, he knew for sure there was no way he could get used to something so beautiful, especially something with eyes just for him and hair tangled because of him and a face so pure it was sinful to even think it could be tainted. 

"I named myself," Remus informed Serious instead of responding, though he doubted the awe struck face he wore left any vagaries. "I'm glad you like my name because I picked it out myself."

Serious nodded slowly, very tan Remus realized, though he couldn't say how he knew that color, or any color for that matter. The wind chimes sang a sweet song for them, a melodic lullaby or sweet harmony for a blossoming something—was it love? Remus, turning time slowly in his stout eleven year old hands, assigned the sound a color; pink, like the wildflowers poking out of the grass a little ways in the field. He could picture the harmonic waves in that pink color moving a lackadaisical course in the wind, soft and muted.

Serious blinked twice as if clearing his vision then responded, "How did you manage to do that? If I had a choice I would have named myself something brilliant."

Remus returned his wry smile from earlier, amazed, though not entirely surprised, at how quickly the pressing issues could dissipate like sugar granules in clear water, "Wouldn't be hard, Serious is a stupid name."

Apparently this violated some unspoken, but very deeply rooted, contract that formed between them in their short time together because Serious was huffing and spluttering and turning red, well more of a light pink that crept along his neck and dusted his cheeks, "Well it's not that stupid. I mean Sirius is the brightest star in the sky after all."

Only in the twisted depths of his own shame did Remus finally grasp the reality of the situation. They were—like two stars connected by gravity, jittering up and down for each other, fully aware they were two parts of a whole, together insuperable for life or eternity, whichever came first—destined to be together.

"Oh, I-I didn't know that. I thought it was meant to be like the word serious..." Remus wished the crimson—yes, assuredly crimson like he imagined the wings of a bird or the heart of a fire—was a color—no, a burning feeling—he could get used to, but no matter how many times the color stained his face he felt it more intensely than the last, on him and in him, turning his gut in slow, painful circles and firing some hellish flames on the inside of his cranium, "Your name isn't stupid, I'm s-sorry."

"It's okay, Remus," Sirius said. He tasted the name on his tongue with the thoroughness of a wine connoisseur, swirling it in his mouth and letting it sink into his taste buds and finally into the familiar hole of his short term memory.

"What are you doing over here?"

Somewhere in the middle of their conversation Sirius had swallowed his gum, very un-suave-cowboy like of him. "Hiding. From my best mate." Sirius pronounced the words 'best mate' with the type of authority you would expect from a judge or a priest. Given Sirius had the aura of someone who was frequently the exception to most rules, this seemed very unbalanced. 

"Why?"

"We're playing hide and seek." The flippant eye roll and hair flip went unpracticed, but nonetheless hung in the air just as prominently; an unavoidable stab at Remus' ignorance.

"Of course." 

What was it now they were supposed to do? Hold hands and buy each other flowers and spill their love to one another? Remus found himself slightly revolted by the idea, quickly shoving it, along with much less innocent couple-y things, to the dusty corners of his brain for no farther inspection. Not even the chaste pecks on the cheek his parents so readily shared seemed desirable to Remus. His insides squirmed the way they normally did when his father got angry with him.

"Do you live here?"

"N-No. It's my grandmother's. We, um, don't have, uh—no. We don't live here." Remus shuffled his feet in the grass and tried not to imagine all the ways he could make an even bigger fool of himself in front of his supposed soulmate. Nevertheless they played persistently behind his eyelids every time he blinked, in horrid full color.

"I don't live around here either. I'm just visiting my friend. We met at school, you know? And he's my best mate." Again that damning finality to those words 'best mate.' Childishly protective of something rightfully his. "He taught me all the bad words I know. You're never going to be my best mate, you know? Never. I don't care if you're my soulmate, you'll never be my best mate."

Remus wavered between outright offense and crippling hurt. "I! I..." He went with the latter, curling in on himself like a stray dog might after many days of no food and beatings. There was a passionate glow behind Sirius' eyes, untouchable even to the new colors buzzing around him. "I'm sorry. I didn't mean t-to be... I won't, I w-wouldn't t-try to do that. I'm sorry I didn't mean to, to do it. You can go. I unders-stand. You never have to see me again and you can have your best mate and you don't have to be soulmates with a freak like me." The sobs clogging his chest constricted his breathing so that only deep rasps and gasps could be upheaved. As tears blurred the new colors, slowly wiping them from his vision, Remus backed away from the boy, ashamed, feeling the crippling weight of disappointment burn down the length of his body. He crossed his arms over his chest and let the hot tears stream down his cheeks.

"Why are you crying?" Sirius seemed rather put upon when he asked the question, as if Remus' emotions were nothing more than a slight inconvenience. His voice was boisterous, like he was speaking from an elevated level of existence right down onto Remus. It would have been convincing had his voice not wavered, "What are you on about?" Sirius scowled in a fraudulent attempt to recreate the uncaring, aloofness his own parents showed when ever he got emotional, but the sniffling weakened the stone cold ire his expression was supposed to hold.

"Y-You can go. You can g-g-go just like everyone else. I know I'll never be your m-mate or your s-soulmate or your whatever. You can g-g-g-" Remus was never able to finish the word as he was enveloped, forcefully, by two boney arms.

"Stop crying, alright? I didn't mean it like that," Sirius huffed in his ear, an odd oxymoron of comforting and distant. 

Remus noted absently he smelled like expensive clothes, like pressed sheets and flowery perfume that just barely clung on to thread's of the boy's shirt with its manicured fingernails. Uncertainly, Remus brought his own boney arms around Sirius' back and gave a firm squeeze, too far gone to register the tear and snot stain he was forming on Sirius' shoulder. The shirt itself, a cotton blend in a green deeper than the pines of the conifer trees off in the distance, was very soft where Remus was resting his cheek, softer than his mother's flannel shirt when he buried his head in her chest or his father's tweed jackets when he was gruffly pulled to his side.

"I'm sorry," Remus whispered.

"What for?" Sirius, now, had lost all the edge to his voice so it came out subdued and muffled, only for the two of them. 

"I ruined your shirt and I cried and I fell on you and I'm your soulmate." 

Remus let his arms droop to his sides like the bowing head of a flower in rain. Sirius, in turn, let go and began looking at his feet while he shifted, with the sway of a planet in search of its star.

"Well, it's alright. Maybe it's wrong 'cause I don't like boys."

"Me neither!" Remus quickly assured, nodding emphatically, eyes rounded in innocence the way eyes get when they pour out the truth, or the best version of the truth the owner knows.

"My mother says liking boys is wrong."

As Sirius tugged on the sleeve of his shirt, long sleeved even though it was the middle of summer, Remus caught sight of a purple bruise circling his wrist, inking a clear hand right on the caramel skin. Remus' heart skipped a beat, but, before he could say a thing, the sleeve was viciously tugged down the rest of the arm and Sirius was glaring. This glare was not an imitation of something scarier, it was something scarier, an almost animalistic, predatory glare that made Remus stumble back.

"M-My mum says liking boys is perfectly natural. She s-says love is pure and can't be tainted by anything, not e-e-even gender."

Shifting his face to scrupulously inspect every finesse of Remus' words, Sirius raised a suspicious eyebrow, "Sounds mushy to me. I know first hand love can be tainted."

"Well then it's not true love," Remus shout back, proud he had thought of such a quick response, without eve stuttering once, nearly beaming until Sirius snapped.

"My parents do love me!" he roared, balling his little fists at his side and attempting to look more impressive by leaning over like a wobbling tower.

Remus almost turned into a puddle of tears right then. Some time ago the wind chimes stopped playing the lovely pink song, leaving a distant and desolate howl in its place to reverberate through their silence. 

"I'm sorry..." Remus tried to force up words, but they stuck in the pit of his stomach like bad food. "I didn't mean to... I-I don't believe it anyway. I'm sure your p-parents love you. I-I think she was talking about romantic love anyway."

The anger, like steam, rose from Sirius' body, deflating his tense posture until he was the elegant ten year old boy Remus had first met.

"I take it back. Your mum's a nutter too." 

Remus ventured a smile though little else. Both their faces faltered when they caught sight of each other's eyes, blue and brown, new colors, the opening to another universe. 

"Do you think we're really soulmates?" Remus asked with trepidation. 

While waiting for the answer he tugged at the hem of his large sweater. It had fraying threads from all those years ago when his father had worn it to school and on walks with his mother through these very fields. The smell was old and musty and just a little bit like spicy teas, from all the years it had spent in the attic of his grandmother's house. The colors, long fading to grays and sporadic reds, seemed to have simply slipped off the front of it. Only now, really looking at it for the first time in his life, did Remus see what his mother had meant by, 'proceeding beyond vintage, to tacky.' 

"Well it's never been wrong before, so I guess..." Sirius shrugged carefree more than insecure. He licked his lips and squinted at Remus' coppery hair, glittering in the sunlight. His eyes, always attracted to shiny things similar to most children his age, seemed to naturally move to the rushing waves, like the tides of an ocean, "Besides I think your mum is probably right. My mother's wrong about all sorts. I bet she's wrong about this too. I don't mind you're a bloke. Girls have always bothered me anyway."

Remus found it amusing a little boy of Sirius' age could speak with such confidence, about such unimportant things, even he found himself bobbing his head dutifully. 

"That's probably good. Can't do anything about it anyway. What do we do now?"

"Kiss?" Sirius suggested like a doctor would recommend medicine, clinical and ambivalent. Remus nearly gagged at the thought. He studied Sirius thoroughly, his shiny black hair that fell just above his shoulders, that may one day flip and cause a girl to swoon from overstimulation, and his cheeks not nearly as rounded as Remus' own, holding the sort of aristocratic sharpness only capable through a good deal of inbreeding and generations of corrupt politics that shaved anything remotely frivolous out, even of the face. The boy was tall and clearly held the potential to be attractive, like he was a cookie cutter awaiting the fill of dough, his future self's shadow evident in his every toss of the hair and flippant hand gesture.

"Ew," Remus said, sticking his tongue out for good measure.

Sirius shrugged his shoulders, not even pretending to be offended by the rejection, "Well, we'll have to do it someday, won't we?"

Reluctantly, Remus submitted, understanding deep within the crevices of his partially developed mind the truth the statement held. Every child learned from a young age, like the alphabet and communist propaganda, soulmates are always meant to be together, will always be together, no exceptions, "Okay, but not today."

Sirius smirked in the way only those who frequently got what they wanted, not through entitlement but through coercion, are able to pull off, "It's a deal. Have you kissed anyone before?"

Remus pursed his lips and shook his head slowly, "No. You?" He had learned long ago shame in these sort of things did no good, shame in how much he loved hugging his mother or sitting on his father's lap or learning to knit with his grandmother and not growing up with the rote childhood designed for every little boy or girl. He may be shameful about many things, but his isolation was a thing he held dear.

"No. S'normal though."

Remus laughed out loud, startling even himself with the high pitched squeals. At the look of unimpressed, disillusion on Sirius' face, he tried, half heartedly, to cover up his chuckling behind his palm. His efforts were for not because the giggles were like bubbles trying to escape him, and, oddly enough, he felt himself become lighter, as if there really were bubbles building within him, about to make him light enough to drift away in the wind like a kite.

"It is normal! You haven't kissed anyone either!" Sirius looked two seconds away from stomping his foot on the packed dirt and screaming with some deep, primal instinct.

Remus, now trying with all the might in his chest to suppress the laughs spluttering from his lips, shook his head and wiped the tears of mirth from his eyes. "No," he wheezed, "It's not that. I just did something normal without realizing it." Remus plopped on the ground and curled in on himself like he was being tickled, the grass, even prettier up close, pricking his cheeks and in between the holes in his sweater. "I'm normal!"

The sun was blocked slightly as Sirius stood over him, with every inclination to join written between the lines on his scrunched up face, "I wouldn't say you're normal..."

Gasping for air on his back, staring into the sun the way his mother told him not to, for fear of blindness, a fate, to an artist like her, worse than death, Remus found his chest oddly empty of the tangled ball of anxieties that usually resided there. He smiled wider and more freely than he had in a long while, little giggles still bubbling from within his chest at random intervals. He ignored the looming shadow over him as well as the posh face that thought it was too good for something as immature as giggling in the grass.

"'Course I would get the soulmate that's all messed up in the head," Sirius muttered, sitting himself down next to Remus with a natural elegance no one, not even a respected adult or a prima ballerina, should possess.

Remus complacently shrugged his shoulders, the sweet breeze tickling his nose and the long hairs at the back of his neck. Lazily, Remus remembered his adoration for the breeze that day and silently thanked it for keeping him cool under the splotchy shade of the gnarled oak tree. Beside him Sirius plucked at blades of grass and steadfastly refused to lay down, to bring himself to Remus' level. They listened, with naive ears, to the call and response of the wind chimes and the wind, blinking and soaking in their new colors as if they had just been born again, each becoming a part of the earth in which they sat, tangled in the grass and rooted to the dirt, letting the whole moment take them away from everything until they were no more than bodies for bugs to find and crawl on and butterflies to float and land on and the sun to spot and glow on. They rested in the truth not of words, but of themselves, rested in the knowledge that this was real and they were real and colors were real and the world around them was also real. And, more importantly, soulmates were real.

"I like colors," Remus decided as he traced the outline of his hand against the sun for the hundredth time, closing his eyes and enjoying the whirling view of a color stained kaleidoscope behind his eyelids. He began assigning colors to colorless things; the rays of the sun a deep gold, the sound of his father snoring a fuzzy grey, the sizzling of his grandmother's cooking a dark brown.

"Me too," Sirius whispered while staring at his own hands. His hair now hung in his face and blocked Remus from any of his expressions. Sometime in their silence he had hunched closer to Remus' level, had gained a faint smile which now lost with the wind. Still, Remus averted his eyes and dug his fingers into the dirt of the ground, feeling like he was intruding, like if he didn't stop himself his fingers may brush that hair aside for a glimpse behind the endless, black curtain.

"Who's your best mate?" Remus asked. His voice, he always found, was light, maybe a little too high pitched, but that day he thought it mixed with the light pink of the wind chimes rather nicely. Orange and pink, like a sunset he could only conjure in his mind. His mother would be bubbling over with joy just to share these things with him once she figured out what had happened. He sighed wistfully, imaging perhaps another little boy at his side, with him and his mother for the first time in what must have been his entire life.

Sirius had the faint smile again, the one where it looked like he may allow himself to be a child if only for a second. "James Potter. He's totally brilliant. I didn't mean you shouldn't try to be my best mate, I meant you couldn't. He's so wicked no one could live up to him."

The gentle smile rolling over Remus' face quickly fell right back down the hill, until his lips were no longer even visible on the plateau of his face, "I probably won't."

"I thought we would be soulmates but then he saw color for another girl," Sirius shrugged his shoulders, attentively plucking at the grass. "But it's okay. He's my best mate and it'd be weird if we were together."

"Is that what you say or what he says?" Remus asked gently, shifting his head in the grass so he was staring directly at Sirius, or more precisely Sirius' knee, which was jutting out as the boy sat, legs criss crossed, shoulders hunched.

"Both," Sirius muttered, ruthlessly splitting a blade of grass down the middle with a fingernail. Remus wished he would just draw back his hair so he could see his eyes once more and imagine them coupling with a wide smile.

"You sure you're not interested in boys? I mean your soulmate is a boy so I guess we both are." Remus raised his shoulders for another carefree shrug but Sirius whipped around and snarled before he could finish the action so he looked, instead, like a stricken puppet. 

"Don't say things like that," the boy bit out between gritted teeth, eyes smoldering, hot breath ghosting over Remus' face, tendrils of hair brushing Remus' cheek as Sirius' face blocked out the sun and the birds and the sky above.

"S-Sorry," Remus breathed, barely above a whimper, voice not withstanding. 

At the sound of the near plea, a look of powerful revulsion, souring the jovial face into a crusty look belonging on an expired old man, passed across Sirius' face and in an instant the boy was crawling backwards shaking his head and muttering apologies, a horrified gleam never leaving from the recesses of his eyes.

With a grunt, more a gasp than a manly cough like he was going for, Remus sat up, wiping off the clots of dirt from his fingers and between his fingernails on the fabric of his pants, "It's fine, just..." Remus sprawled his fingers over his knees, happily noting how long they were. Soon they would reach across an octave on the keyboard, a stretch, for him, as great as the Atlantic Ocean for Columbus. 

"I didn't mean to scare you. I didn't mean to do that. I promised myself I'd never. I promised James and Reg and Peter. I didn't mean to be so... I never want to be like them!" Sirius hurled the words with more conviction than he could have a stone or missile. He scrunched his fingers in fists and then released the grasp along with a long breath, like a whistle of steam leaving a train.

"Okay, well, don't do it again, o-okay?" Remus swallowed though the spit he needed wasn't there and his throat felt thick. "I'm sorry I said those things though. I-I didn't realize they'd make you angry. I'm, I'm not really used to having people my age to, to talk to..."

There was a dower down tilt to Sirius' face as if he were trying to keep rain from his eyes, "Well, usually you wouldn't say those things but I guess you're my soulmate so it's okay." A damning finality filled the words as soon as they were uttered.

"You're right though," Sirius said in a whisper meant only for the confessional at church, "I, well, I liked him and I didn't exactly say anything, but I joked about it and he didn't take it seriously and then later he said he thought it would be weird. And I don't want to be weird Remus."

Remus saw the words for what they were, penance, a weight to even the scales, another stipulation to their contract, a sobering confession that plunged them both into water much closer to adulthood than they felt comfortable with, "I understand. Do you, do you love your friend? Like in a love, love sort of way?"

Sirius put on a thinking face that finally looked age appropriate, the kind of face given to deciding which crayon to use next or which car to race around the house with now. "No I think I just thought... Maybe we'd be good together 'cause we're so good mates, you know? But he's already in love with his soulmate and he's think it's weird..."

"I know what it's like not wanting to be weird. It's okay though. It might not work out with your friend but maybe you'll see you're better off friends anyway. Maybe one day you'll find someone else."

Sirius let out a little laugh and the sun rippled through the grass and the aging walls of the cottage hummed in approval and the shrieks of the children started up again, even more distant than before, and they made eye contact and there was a different kind of heart racing explosion stirring inside their chests and Remus swore all the unseen turned into the brilliant orange-red color of silk kimonos or water rippling under sunsets. 

"Like you?"

They each laughed feebly like it was some sort of joke, them being together, when both had already let the words sink into their chests, all down their bodies to their toes until the realization filled the pits of their stomachs with a thick, murky split pea soup.

"Is your mate James ever going to come find you?"

"He probably gave up. I went out of bounds. I was... I didn't want to hear him talk about how much he loved Lily and how great his parents were-" Sirius cut himself off and looked down at his pleated pants. All the confidence and lazy elegance from before seemed to have drained out of his shoulders and broad chest so he was less of the cowboy character and more of the real boy Remus knew he should be.

"Well you can be with me for a while, if you want..." Remus allowed his heart a single hopeful beat before quickly stifling it away, like contraband, sucking his lips into a thin line as he waited, without breathing, for a single response, like a single snowflake to start the storm.

"Yeah, that'd be... yeah." Sirius smiled and it wasn't the rugged, know it all smirk with the cocksure eagerness, it was small and precariously hanging off his lips as if at any given moment it could slip off, blow off with the hardly there wind.

"What do you normally do with your friends?" Remus muttered.

Sirius had to admire the shade of red that took over Remus' cheeks as he looked down into his lap and began to unravel the threads of his sweater.

"We've established neither of us are normal. Let's do something different. Hey, why did you fall out the window?"

Remus knew he couldn't get any more red before crossing the line and actually becoming a pile of red mush like tomato sauce. "I dropped my book." He made a gesture to the fallen tome without really giving it the time of day.

"What book?"

"Fairytales." Remus was certain he was slowly shrinking, melting in his clothes and becoming that promised pile of sloshing red.

"Are they any good?" Sirius' voice was right by his ear, making him stiffen as the hot breath just touched his cheek, like dust over a dresser. Their hips were brushing and Sirius seemed to be almost bouncing with newfound energy and he was accidentally elbowing Remus, which surprisingly didn't bother him at all, instead making him feel like he was sitting next to a firework about to go off.

"I think so."

"Well, then, read me one." It wasn't a command in the formal sense but as Sirius lay back on the grass with a grin, all canine confidence, stretching his back while reaching his hands over his head, grazing Remus' side, Remus didn't dare disobey.

"We could read Little Red Riding Hood. Have you read it before?" Given that his childhood had been stocked with stories and adventure and evenings cuddled to either of his parents side under a hand crafted quilt that had run its course seven times over, Remus almost certainly expected the automatic answer; yes.

"No. Read it to me."

"Please," Remus said before he could quite stop the word from spilling from his mouth. He said it in the way his mother did when he whined for more candy, which, these days was so few and far between she ended up giving it to him without the argument, a grey—well probably not grey—cloud of sadness fogging her irises. 

"Please," Sirius repeated, cracking one eye open to examine Remus with half hearted dedication. 

Remus flushed, pretending to accidentally kick Sirius lightly with the toe of his shoe, and adjusted the newly retrieved book in his lap. He held it like his father must have held it two weeks after his birth in the antique shop he liked to call a, 'fashionable hoarder's daydream,' because of its leaning tower of books and high piles of knick knacks coagulating into one mass. There was a certain ease he found in reading words already scripted for him. These words, he could be sure, were the right ones and his voice carried them with quiet confidence that stilled even the breeze and made it listen. They sat like that, Remus furled together like the lines of text within the pages of his book, sweater drooping over his shoulders and pooling in his lap, Sirius sprawled on the ground as if he owned the plot of land right below him, hanging off each word with the ferocity of someone dangling over a cliff, for what time could only be measured in the movement of the sun closer to the horizon.

"That's a messed up story," Sirius decided after the echo of the finishing line had stopped filling the hollow space of the field around them.

"All these are kind of messed up. Usually they tell kids nicer ones, like in Disney, but I like these better because they're the originals."

Wistfully, Remus gazed at the book in his lap, stroking the spine like one might stroke a cat, eyeing the words and recalling so many days, when he had felt so sick of his own reflection, how he could crawl into the armchair with the giant coffee stain on the arm and inevitably find himself nestled deep within the book as well. He felt bad, now, for the brown smudges he had left on the margins of each turned page with the innards of contraband chocolate.

"You like books a lot, don't you?" Sirius asked, all too knowingly, propped on his elbows and squinting at him again, eyes examining each of his finer points in great detail, down to his every pore and freckle.

"You can get lost in them. Not be yourself, you know?"

Sirius stroked his chin as if trying to get hair to grow right then and there, to speed up the puberty process. "You'd think I'd like reading more. Then again my parents always try to force boring ones down my throat so really it's no surprise."

"All depends on the book."

The air held the sweet smell of summer, like watermelons and blossoming flowers and dripping honey, like crackling late night bonfires with toasted marshmallows sticking to palms and cheeks and spilled punch turning pink as the sun takes the water all around it into its clutches.

"Do you want some chocolate?"

Finally, finally, at long last, Sirius looked exactly like a little boy his age ought to, as he nearly toppled Remus over, shaking his shoulders with pent up exuberance, "Yes! My mother never gives me chocolate! Even Ms. Potter says no sometimes! Yes!"

Remus chuckled, dazed to be the spiraling center of a gaze as intense as Sirius'. They broke the remaining bar in half, licking their fingers as the heat of their bodies turned the stiff bars into a goo even more delicious when they licked it off their fingertips in a tiny defiance of social conventions. When each was coated with blips of dripping chocolate around their mouths and fingers they leaned in together, contented.

"You think James'll ever find me?"

Remus smelled the chocolate on his breath and the grass he had been laying in and the sort of buzzing excitement you usually get with electricity and he liked it, much more than the too put together smell of clean laundry. He also liked how their foreheads nearly bumped together and their eyes locking created a corner of reality just for the two of them.

"Maybe. He is your best mate. They always find each other."

"And soulmates?"

Remus looked at him through his eyelashes, risking a smile, expecting none in return, "I'll find you. That's a warning."

"Oh yeah? I'm not scared." Sirius put on a confident face, a boy playing at knight face, a lion cub face, tilting his chin up in his all knowing, not ten, eleven year old, confidence. 

"You should be. I'm named after a boy raised by wolves."

"Yeah, well I'm named after the brightest star in the sky."

They made eye contact, suppressing grins and giggles because they thought this moment required some level of maturity to prove themselves to each other. 

"You still haven't kissed me," Sirius said, eyes lowering to Remus' overly pink lips, overly pink in Remus' mind at least; Sirius thought the pink was just right, a perfect dosage that left little room for improvement by way of sticky lip gloss. 

"Who said I would?" Oddly enough, after speaking, Remus floundered with his lips until he ended up clenching them together in a trembling fault line.

"You did. You said we could kiss."

"I said not today."

"Well I don't like listening to rules all that much."

Remus wondered sometimes if he really was eleven or if his parents had just forgotten his birthday one year and pretended it didn't happen. Some days he felt haggard and weary like dust hung in his joints and his skin wrinkled like old paper. Then, with Sirius by his side and the sun turning orange, he felt he was an adult; here he was solemnly talking with his soulmate, of all people, about adult activities like kissing, without so much as flushing or squirming or running away. Instead he was very aware of how close he was leaning into Sirius, those opaque blue eyes swallowing his entire vision and the light scar on his nose, Remus hadn't even noticed before, beguiling him to move closer still.

"You sure you don't like boys?"

"No," Remus gasped. Their noses bumped and he fidgeted so badly he nearly jumped completely away, erasing all their slow progress. There was a whimper winding its way up his throat but he wouldn't let it out, not with Sirius so close he could hear every rustle of clothes and every heartbeat.

"Me neither."

Cautiously Remus tilted his head one way, his eyes closing on their own accord, blinking out all the color and everything else in the world, the pointy grass and the retreating sun and the smell of cooking in the cottage, so all he could feel was the heat coming out of Sirius' core and the quick, timid breaths ghosting over his lips. 

"Sirius! Where are you?! Sirius! Where are you?! Sirius! Where are you?! Sirius! Where are you?! Sirius! Where are you?!"

They snapped apart like retractable rulers, stiff backed and formal for a moment of unprecedented fear that seemed to wash over them, stylistically similar to a tugging ocean tide. 

"It's James," Sirius said faintly. He sucked his lips in. Remus licked his own, vaguely realizing if they had kissed they would have tasted each other's chocolate, or rather the same chocolate.

"Sirius! Where are you?! Sirius! Where are you?!"

"We'll just save it for next time," Remus whispered, only for Sirius' ears as the wailing siren, cycling the call like a broken record, neared.

"I'd like that. Next time," Sirius promised. Probably due to the sensory overload of a little boy falling on his chest and a world of new colors, Sirius hadn't realized how thin Remus was, how the clothes hung off him like they were still on the hanger, nor had he noticed the purple bags coating the underside of his eyes that perhaps looked similar to his own. He had noticed, though, the hair that flopped to cover at least half his face at any given moment. Sirius tucked the fringe behind Remus' ear, letting his fingertips linger by the other boy's temple, face tilting up into a smile incrementally.

"It looks better this way," Sirius informed him softly. Remus blushed again, casting his gaze to his lap, gnawing on his lip to keep from smiling, or maybe crying.

"I'll find you," Remus promised with the light intensity of a small, silver locket being draped over Sirius' neck.

"Please." The call was getting hoarse and disrupted, trod over and scratchy, more and more like a broken record each repetition. Remus, in an act of submission to the romantic within him, pressed the crumpled up chocolate wrapper, still sticky from the remnants of melted chocolate and begotten hopes, into Sirius' palm.

"Good bye, Sirius."

"I'll come back for you."

Sirius pressed his mouth to Remus' forehead, leaving sticky brown outlines where his lips had been. He disappeared almost instantly into the field, nearly slipping from Remus' grasp on reality at the same time. The calling stopped and Remus was left alone, again, in the silence, no wind to fill the air with melodies, no joyous laughs to fill the knolls, no secretive whispers to ring in his ears.

*****

"You scared me." It was an accusation more than anything. 

"I was just outside the house. I didn't leave I swear. I just fell off the window." Remus tugged the book closer to his chest like it was a life preserver. His mother looked down on him with a weathered frown, eroded from so much use in her life. His grandmother laughed from the kitchen.

"Sounds just like you, Hope!" Grandma Howell, as she was so keen on them calling her because she loved the constant reminder of her familial status, called over the sizzling in the pan.

"I was calling you, Remus," his mother continued without addressing the clear hypocrisy.

"Sorry, I didn't hear, but you'll never guess what happened!" Remus brushed her worries off easily, feeling like a soda bottle that had just been shaken, ready to be opened with all the carbon bubbles squeezed into such a small space.

"Remus, you're not listening to me. I don't want-"

"I met my soulmate!"

Hope paused, examining him with an open mouth and blank eyes, "You what?" Her entire body had frozen stiff until it was an odd cardboard cutout of the normal Hope Lupin.

"I met my soulmate! And I like him! And he's brilliant! And we promised to find each other again! He might be back tomorrow!" Remus swayed on his feet, punch drunk and nearly toppling over from the excitement. 

"Oh, Remus." His mother stooped to is level with a water worn look to her face. "You know if wanted more attention you could just say, dear. There's no need to make up silly stories. No one comes out here."

The soft and wrinkled hands on his shoulders didn't help Remus come up with the right words to explain. Sadly, he looked to his feet, scuffing them on the carpet, a cheap knock off of a Persian rug. "No, I'm, I'm not m-making it up. He was here because he was hiding from his best mate and I read him Little Red Riding Hood. I can see color now!"

Despite his abundance of evidence, Hope still looked at him with the pity of someone who thought too highly of their own understanding.

"Remus, dear, please don't joke about these things-"

"I'm not joking! I'm not!" Remus quickly clasped a hand over his mouth in dismay at his own somewhat harsh words, dropping the book in the process. It hit the floor with a powerful thud like a judge's gavel, "I can show you. Your eyes are green and your shirt is pink and there are yellow flowers on it and your hair is really dark brown like chocolate and the sky is a really beautiful blue. I'm, I'm not making it up I swear!"

"Why did he leave?"

"His friend was calling him!" The excitement grew in Remus' voice until he was almost yelling, gushing, words falling, toppling over each other to leave his mouth, "He had to go! I gave him my chocolate wrapper and we promised we would find each other! He said please! He had really clear blue eyes and dark black hair and his name was Sirius, like the star not the word, which I thought at first but that was wrong. I fell on him and he called me by my name, my real name, and he didn't for one second think I was a girl!" Remus panted heavily, having gone through a marathon of speech for him. Never, in his entire decade of existence, had he remembered talking so impassioned and for so long about something, maybe aside from books.

"Alright, Remus, I believe you, I'm sorry for doubting you. Sirius you said his name was?" His mother's soothing voice didn't slow his happily skipping heart rate. He hadn't noticed, in his excitement, his father coming home.

"What's going on now?" Lyall asked, smiling in an unassuming way, with the last rays of dying orange sunlight spilling onto his forehead. He looked imposing in the doorway, so very tall, and lean, which made him look at least a head taller than he was already. Remus remembered being little and nearly jumping out of his socks for his dad to pick him up and fly him around, whisk him away to the clouds, surely the height the older man stood at because, at the age of stumbling steps and three word sentences, being so tall was a whole other level of the stratosphere.

"Remus here has found his soulmate. Apparently his name is Sirius." Hope sent him a look Remus didn't realize was so significant as he beamed expectantly at his father.

"He, huh?" Remus wavered under his father's deep eyes. "Good for you. Do you like what you see?"

The horrid romantic implications made Remus stick his tongue out, "What?"

"The colors dear, not the boy," Hope assured him with another gentle squeeze to his shoulder blade.

Grandma Howell coughed fiercely in the kitchen as she laughed like she was howling through a rusted horn.

"Oh, yeah. Yeah," he sighed, turning his lustrous eyes to the window. He glimpsed again the sunset he had watched at least an hour after Sirius had left him.

"Good. Did he tell you where he lived?" Lyall stepped out from the doorway and crouched in front of Remus. The boy felt like he was meeting with giants, or possibly Gods. The smells of mashed potatoes and sausages began wafting through the house, filling easily every hole and corner in a thick and comforting fog. Remus assigned it a muted orange, tucking this day away permanently, in the vaults of his brain.

"He said he'll come find me. He said he wants to come find me. Someone wants to find me. We must be soulmates."

*****

The rest of the summer, from days dripping with sweaty heat to evenings cooling with neutral warmth, Remus waited on the windowsill. He waited with a book in his lap, holding more pictures than normal so he could just look at their woven beauty, for hours every day. The day directly after was the longest, like purgatory, a book in his lap he couldn't quite grasp and an annoying sweat making the sweater itch his slick skin, like there were ticks crawling between each thread and fiber. The sun glared at him, or maybe stared with knowing accusation. He didn't care and the next day it all felt like a dream he had once when he was feverish. Only when he got shipped off to a boarding school while his parents found another house did the small little hope, a nestled folded hope, tucked deep within his chest, begin to whither and crinkle like all old paper did.

Each summer, even then, he would beg until his throat was soar, to spend the time at his grandmother's cottage on the off chance his black haired knight would come and sweep him off his feet, carry him away from the sneers and the laughs and the itchy feeling crawling beneath his skin.

But, of course, as the planet made one rotation after another around the sun and each summer became drier and drier still, the neatly folded hope turned to dust little by little until all that was left was a small pile of ash resting somewhere deep within his chest cavity. He was never so melodramatic to cry, though the fantasies of what was or could have been that played themselves out in his dreams couldn't be helped. He didn't dote on it still and going to his grandmother's became a habit, a routine like folding socks or smoking. Despite the regularity of the visits Remus found his wont of sitting on the windowsill, until his skin turned olive and his freckles dotted his face like ink, shrinking in inverse proportion with his growing limbs and the discomfort he felt crumpling to fit in the small space. 

Every so often, still—though he berated himself mercilessly after with slander even his biggest enemies would cringe at saying—he would think, if only for a second of heart pounding exhilaration, he would see a black head jogging towards him on the horizon. Every time, without fail, it would be a bird or a mailman or anything but his one time friend and full time soulmate. And so the days would get shorter and Remus' time on the window would wane, though never diminish; the last few coins he had to offer his sappy pile of hope.

Remus grew and with him a piece inside of him he would later find the courage to call confidence. It was a silver shield and a beacon, apparently, because friends flocked to him like he was a chip and they were seagulls. And Sirius and his electric smiles and blue eyes like icy lakes retreated farther back in his head until he was just a persistent buzz hanging around inside his mind. And Remus was, in a cozy, comfortable in his own skin way, happy to retreat from a single Sunday afternoon in which he had only given a chocolate candy wrapper and a piece of his happiness.

*****

The bookstore, despite the many rude customers and the dim lighting—Remus found this particular attribute ironic for a place devoted to reading—and frequent break ins, had AC and somehow that made every sniveling customer and eye strain and slightly lighter pocket worth so much more. He sat in his chair, hunched so far over he was practically falling into his book, while a coworker tried, and failed, to appease an avid book collector waiting for their special order. 

"I'm taking my business else where," the woman sniffed. Remus subtly flipper her off behind the pages of his novel.

"Ma'am if you just-"

"No!"

The woman, a tight lipped, hawk like creature with a hat that had feathers sticking from one side, proceeded to flounce out, her personality seeming to continue filing out long after she herself had fled the building. 

"Kill me," Alice asked, nearly demanded, into the palms of her hands.

"Can't. Engrossed. Besides we have AC."

Without looking, Remus knew the girl had flung up her hands and walked back into the shelves to go gripe to their boss, again, about unfriendly clientele. In their boss's defense there wasn't much he could do about limiting the population of idiots on the planet, specifically the pretensions kind that asked for hard to get books.

"What are your plans for the future, Remus?" Marlene asked—clearly ignorant to the depths in which Remus was entangled within this book—leaning with a lollipop sticking from the corner of her mouth, onto the counter in a casual manner. She had, not moments ago, been laughing, not so subtly, at the spectacle of Alice trying to remain calm when they all knew her temper was one never to trifle with, even on her good days.

"Death and taxes."

Marlene snorted. Alice shrieked something high pitched and wailing in the back.

"No really, you're seventeen, last year of school before Uni's coming up, what are your plans?"

"All my career perspectives are shit. I expect I'll have to find myself a rich husband."

Marlene fluttered her eyelashes, lowering them smoothly to half mast as she leaned even farther over the desk, so her short legs hardly reached the floor at all. "That elusive soulmate of yours, hm?"

The book was now just a pretense, a ruse to disguise his discomfort with the conversation, and the pangs of disappointment he could never quite conceal from his face, "You know I've given up on that a long time ago. Besides, marrying outside your soulmate isn't completely shunned. I'll find an old, wealthy man who's partner has died and consul him until he marries me and promises me all his money."

"But what if your soulmate is still out there?!" Marlene was now halfway on top of the desk, crumpling papers beneath her hip and urgently placed palm. "What if he's waiting for you?"

"I don't know six summers of waiting has mollified the hope and anticipation. I think, as morbid as he sounds, he could possibly be dead. That little time we spent together was pretty magical. Maybe that was meant to be the height of my life."

Marlene flung herself full force into the desk with Shakespearean drama, sending loose papers flying and skittering across the floor and nearly knocking the archaic computer into the trash can, where it rightfully belonged, in Remus' opinion.

"Where's your sense of romance?! You didn't even kiss. He's out there, probably worshipping the shirt you cried on and dreaming of the hot boy-"

"We were eleven."

"Adorable little boy who made him see a world of colors."

This time, with all the formalities friendship can so easily shove aside out of the way, Remus flipped Marlene off in full view, despite the red heat the words spread along his cheekbones and down the collar of his shirt. "It sounds nice but life isn't a fairytale. We made no real plans to meet each other again. Besides the soulmate thing only shows who you'll work best with not who you'll most certainly end up with. We could have easily squandered it away." Remus shrugged loosely as if it didn't cause his muscles strain. 

Despite the years and his up front so-called aloofness to the whole thing, Remus could still remember very vividly every detail of Sirius' face, every detail of the day leading up to and after that point. He remembered having eggs for breakfast and spilling some jam on the floor. He remembered chasing a butterfly for a full ten minutes fruitlessly, of course, not that he would want to catch it anyway. He remembered clambering to the windowsill by way of the scraggly back of their corduroy couch. He remembered shifting so the glaring sun was out of his eyes. He remembered the book falling, nearly missing a life ending rip to the pages. He remembered plopping his chin in his hands as soon as Sirius had gone, resolutely staring at the horizon until the sun finally met his eyes. 

"So unromantic. Have more hope." Marlene checked her watch while laying stomach down on the desk, practically swimming in the papers. "It's about closing time. Two minutes away. I have a friend coming by, by the way. I'll flip the sign."

Alice's disgruntled harangue had long ended, leaving only a ticking silence in its place. There was, naturally, the sound of old pages being turned that accompanied any self respecting vintage book emporium, somewhere far off, an echo of past lives and forgotten times. Remus contributed to the page turning with his own resigned movements. The smell, he decided, was a light brown, like dust caught in the rays of the sun, a cracking leather spine and crumbling, brittle page smell that followed Remus everywhere now, like cologne might a wealthy venture capitalist. 

"What are the odds of setting the store on fire if I smoke in here?" Marlene asked, skimming her long, painted nails over the spines of books, swerving like a serpent every step, pretending to find interest in what she was doing.

"Ninety two percent." Remus turned a page. He was surprised, honestly, he didn't get more paper cuts than he did, given the amount of time he spent with books, which would be roughly equivalent to another teen his age's time on the Internet. He was not surprised, however, at the parched quality his fingers seemed to gain from flipping the pages of ancient books made seventy percent of dust and working so frequently in the back stacks in air with dust pollution thicker than any urban city center in China.

"Oddly specific. I won't risk it. I'll be out soon. If my friend gets here tell him I'm in the loo."

Remus only half processed the words she was saying, but nodded in the automatic way his head sometimes did when he wasn't entirely there. He could have read for hours or seconds and he couldn't have been able to tell the difference. Reading was like flying in warp drive, distorting time around his wills and sending him to distant worlds. So, when the door opened with the ringing of the not so quaint bell, once you've listened to it hundreds of times a day for the past four weeks, he wasn't sure at what time or in what place he was, only that the sign read closed and a person had entered.

"It's ironic you can't read given you're in a bookstore," Remus drawled.

The illiterate may very well have been mute too. Remus flipped a page with the grace of a composer conducting his orchestra. He glanced up just enough through his eyelashes to see the visitor was most certainly a young man, possibly teenager, though the hood of his thick lashes provided little else detail.

"What?" the intruder finally asked. He didn't have the deep monotone Remus usually associated with illiterates or Neanderthals, which certainly helped the illiterate's cause.

"The sign says closed."

The illiterate, Remus liked the pseudonym, perhaps too sadistically, began to splutter out a sentence in a language Remus was all to familiar with when it came to peasants and his sarcastic repertoire. 

"Eh, no, er, you see-"

"Despite what your parents may have told you you aren't a special snowflake. The rules apply to you too. Besides I promise the store will be open tomorrow. I can't imagine used books have gotten you in so much of a tizzy you had to come here after closing."

Remus scanned the line he was supposed to be reading again while leaning farther back in his chair in a way only one who knew they could afford such confident luxuries could. There was a possibility that he hoped, deep down in the sacrilegious part of him which still cared what others thought of him, buried beneath the cinders of jading words and crumbled layers of his heart, he looked somewhat urbane, with his legs crossed and his fingers held elegantly, poised for a cigarette or fancy diamond rings or a set of cards for poker, and with his eyes scanning the words of a book with a somewhat pretentious title, not even doing the illiterate the courtesy of a glance in his direction.

"No, that's not it." The illiterate laughed and, curse his depraved brain, did he actually find the laugh quite soothing, quite nice, gentle snowfall, flowing river, pale blue, never opaque blue, though, of course.

"Wait, you haven't come to rob us, have you? I don't know who spread the rumor that we're loaded, but we're not. Also Marlene could break your nose, easy. Stop robbing us."

Finally, Remus snapped the book shut around one long, paper-cut finger, sitting up and daring his eyes to appraise the illiterate standing before him with his laughs like gentle waves. His first impression was slack jawed, hormonal bliss as he took in the tight jeans and leather jacket and oddly revealing white v-neck. From the rugged combat boots to the studded belt, this man standing before him was definitely some sort of punk God, perhaps a part time rock star or auto mechanic. He did have a sleek black smell like motor oil and a profuse second hand smoke miasma one only got hanging about seedy places. As Remus worked his shrewd eyes up the man's body in a manner that could be confused for sizing one up, if someone was so thickly rooted in heterosexuality, the illiterate coughed and shifted on his feet. Without even looking into his eyes, Remus knew this was the type of man hardly acquainted with gazes of unimpressed, ambivalence. He was the type of man used to wooing or enraging, and nothing in between. But Remus would never let him have the pleasure of such a black and white world. Everything looked better with color, after all.

Remus reached the man's face right as he placed his book in his lap complacently. In a cartoon his heart would have jumped out of his chest. The face was gorgeous, light brown skin, light blue eyes, perfect symmetry, high cheek bones. It matched the outline that had formed behind Sirius the day they had met, the outline of future beauty, but Remus was all to familiar with the subtle let down of small hopes to even begin to wonder if the connection was real.

"I'm actually here to meet Marlene." The man, well perhaps fledgling man, was taking quick shallow breaths and furling and unfurling his bruised knuckles into fists, making little gentle taps with his clicking rings. It appeared he was trying to read Remus' mind. Just in case, because the superstition never left him, Remus screamed internally. When the man did not flinch, he went back to shameless fantasizing.

"Why didn't you say so?" Remus teased a little more lightly. 

There was something disarming about the way this actually-not-illiterate stood there as if awaiting a blow to the chiseled jaw. Remus decided as far as set pieces went, he was all right; attractive but not in a gaudy way, though undoubtedly not subtle either. Just a shimmering attractiveness actors and models aspire to with coats of make up and risky plastic surgeries. Standing there in a get up screaming seventies punk, this man was a vision of something so other worldly and unobtainable it made Remus almost believe the man would flicker out, disappear only to be remembered as a figment of his perverted imagination. He was just that kind of out of place enigma, as fickle as a spring breeze or a leaf in the wind or a golden ripple in a lake. 

"Ha." The man stepped closer to the counter with—was that a little insecure grin?—rupturing, just slightly, the illusion of cool. Remus felt small in his clothes, like he hadn't in years, stooped in his rolly-chair with tea spilled on his khaki trousers and a pen lodged somewhere deep within the masses of his curls, sticking it's point out with odd accusation.

"She'll be out in a minute. Just popped in the loo." Remus made a show of dragging a fake cigarette to his lips and blowing the fake smoke out.

The man nodded and bit his lip, eyes darting around the place as if expecting a cue from someone off stage. Remus slid the book off his finger and crossed his arms above his chest. Now, under the careful gaze of someone he didn't know so closely, he remembered the itch of his binder and the chafe of the completely unnecessary, and baggy, to the point of fully engorging sentient being, sweater against his skin.

"So you work here?" the not-illiterate asked. He made a smile that had, in all likelihood, seen many trial runs and reddened cheeks, many false hopes and forgotten wills, a smile which likely had the power of Helen of Troy.

"I do indeed. Sorting old books is my calling."

The blue eyes crinkled around the edges in amusement and the so very dashing smile grew, "Interesting calling. Has anyone ever told you your eyes are the color of amber?"

The cheek splitting grin softened into a wavering smile, as Remus felt a small flush began spreading like a virus on his cheeks. "You'd be the first." The silence was more muted, a silence his mother would say was waiting patiently to be filled, but then again his mother did always spout ridiculous personifications.

"That's a shame. You should have someone tell you that every day. As well as how radiant you are."

"So I'll take that as a no to robbing us, then." Remus gave a wry smile, the kind one gave when they were knee deep in double entendres and subtle confessions. It all seemed rather odd to be having such a conversation with a man who was surely a decedent of Aphrodite, to be told in a luxurious tone like, sweet and deep like jazz music, how beautiful he was, when his beauty was so thin it hardly coated his whole body and left much to be desired, like thin icing on cake.

"Not unless your heart counts."

Remus cringed, hissing through his teeth as he began shaking his head, happy it seemed the universe had balanced the scales in a way, made this adidas less unobtainable, "You were doing so well," he lamented.

"Too cheesy?" the not-illiterate asked. He stepped even closer to the desk, deciding an unclenched fist would suit the situation better, flexing his fingers and then bringing them to rest on the desk, where he promptly leaned with the charisma of James Dean. His eyes danced in a staccato, always finding their way back to Remus in the end of each measure.

"Too cheesy," Remus agreed. In the wake of approaching footstep, the not-illiterate backed away from the counter and worked his hand deep within the confines of his pockets.

"Mustn't look like I'm perving on her coworkers."

Remus let a puff of breath out of his chest. There was a warn and battered chunk of him that said this not illiterate, but gentlemen would be nice for him. Remus looked at the filing papers on the desk and the coercive bowl of free chocolates that taunted him all day, tiptoeing on the ledge, begging to be touched, right now even.

"I wouldn't worry about that, she's been attempting to get me out in the 'dating world' for ages." Deftly, with the precision he had mastered from doing a thing like this an aberrant amount of times, Remus slid his fingernail between the two flaps of the small chocolate wrapper and flipped it open. Before he could ask the pinnacle questions like 'How do you know Marlene?' or 'Do you live around here?' Marlene herself came trotting back to the two of them.

"Oh good, Sirius, you're here. I hope Remus didn't give you any trouble."

And then the universe was rebuilt again, starting from a pinprick of light right behind the opaque blue eyes, where a gentle scar lay, and exploding outward. Molecules formed and collided in the hot, dense space of Sirius' eyes in less than a thousandth of a second and then it spread, washing over Remus, like a swift breeze, an airy happiness he could see reflected right in front of him. Before he could express the long summers in a sentence, the hearts longing in a breath, Remus' fingers gave up and dropped his book to the ground. Sirius blinked twice, the noise awakening him from a trance like sleep it seemed, and he began to smile maniacally. 

"Do you drop your books often?" Sirius asked pleasantly. They were both on a small level vaguely aware of Marlene standing bewildered behind them. She had, after all, come in only half way through their play.

"Only when cute boys come to find me."

Lucky for Remus and his subtle references, Sirius too seemed to have made himself a mental transcript of their entire dialogue, because he smiled.

"Told you I'd find you."

"Took you long enough."

Sirius scoffed and scuffed his toe on the floor and flushed a bright pink. Remus had to remind himself breathing was necessary because one could not sustain themself on pure awe and joy alone. His breath ended up being ragged and loud enough for Sirius to hear in the passing silence. 

"I'm sorry, what's going on?" Marlene turned her head in a slow semi circle on a path between the two, eyeing the two like one would eye strangers yelling at each other in entirely different languages.

"Marlene this is the illustrious soulmate I've told you so much about," Sirius explained with unashamed coolness. The effect was ruined by his exuberant, borderline dorky, grin, looking as new as if it had just been unwrapped and worn for the first time for Remus and Remus alone.

"The one you swore up and down was the most beautiful boy you've ever seen in your entire life? The one who's chocolate wrapper you have folded in a shoebox full of mushy sentimentals? The one-"

"We were both there Marlene. We get it," Sirius cut in, a delicious red, like kissed lips, staining his cheeks. Remus had a grin on that was far more predatory than his ten year old self would ever be able to look at without dry heaving on the pavement. His father may join in when he raised an eyebrow.

"I'm kind of curious actually." Remus flicked his eyes over to Marlene, imploringly, cajolingly, the kind of flick given to playing cards or smoldering cigarette butts.

"Well I will tell you he was smitten with you since the day you met and he refused to give me details aside from the chocolate wrapper and stupid things like your, 'simply radiant copper hair like stands of woven gold or magic.' Said it was special and personal to him. Only James knows I reckon."

Sirius attempted to overcome his flush by grinning and carding his fingers through his resolutely silky hair, tousling it as if he were going to look sexily off into a camera in the next second, "Ha, um, wow, this is a bad first, or second, impression."

"No, it's good. It's really good, actually." 

They shared a smile and Marlene must have muttered something about canceling plans because some time between their unrelenting eye contact and their awkward blushes she had gone.

"What do we do now?" Remus asked. 

"Kiss?" Sirius offered.

"Take me to dinner first?" 

Remus posed the question not in the cheeky way normally reserved for a statement deemed so philistine and outdated but in a truthful inquiry, a hope, a plan, for once.

"Fish and chips alright?"

"Absolutely lovely."

*****

When had summer gotten so cold? Was September rearing its ugly little head so quickly? Was it really that time of year or was it just the impressive darkness that took away all the heat from his body? Remus shivered again, stuffing his hands farther into his pockets even though he knew there was no where else for his stickily fingers to go but through an ever expanding hole. 

"You cold?" Sirius asked. He had, two blocks from the bookshop with a lighter that had seen both better and worse days, lit himself a miniature fire in the form of a rusty red smelling cigarette, with Remus' consent, of course.

"Perpetually," Remus responded without so much as a shutter or tremble to his voice. He was holding the tremors back behind a dam of resilience. He had grown used to feeling cold, sadly not the cold itself.

"Here, give me your hands," Sirius said as he stuck the cigarette between his teeth and opened his palms, facing up, to Remus. They stopped at the edge of the sidewalk right next to a molting pile of vomit and a mailbox with some white graffiti scribbling a gang name on the side as if it were impressive to claim something so mundane as a mailbox. 

"Ooh, how romantic," Remus cooed. Sirius, in spite, grabbed Remus' wrists and yanked his hands from his pockets, prying his nugatory fists open with his radiator warm fingers, while expertly spitting his fag from his mouth.

"Trying to be a gentlemen," Sirius muttered, rather put out, like his smoldering cigarette remnants that lay crushed under his heel.

"I'm sorry, Sirius." Remus cocked his head to the side and slid his hands in between Sirius' warm and soft ones. Now that Remus was so close to these hands he could tell they had the feel of a chronic hand lotion user, someone who had figured out their preferred scent through many trial runs, someone who splurged on the expensive stuff on sad days, someone who could name twenty six brands off the top of their head like they were reciting the alphabet. That kind of softness rubbing over his veins and scars and numb bones. The smell was mint with a little rosemary, the color of mint green in Remus' mind, unsurprisingly.

Sirius smiled under the orange street lamp and the blue of the full moon, a barrier in the slashing wind, a tie that brought Remus' feet firmly to the ground, beginning a gentle rhythm of rubbing his hands along the back's of Remus's. As the pace grew and their bodies moved closer to fill the desolate gap standing between them, Remus shivered, not out of cold at all, but of some ever growing excitement increasing as the friction did between their hands.

"Cold?" Sirius smirked, crooking his lips to one side of his face and tilting his head the other.

"Not in the slightest."

Remus took the final step until their toes were touching and he was under the pool of sunset colored orange along with Sirius. There was static electricity, the kind that sticks socks to sweaters once they're out of the drier, pulling their faces together. Sirius cupped Remus' cheek with that outrageously warm hand of his, like he'd just stuck it next to the heater, and again, as if there had been no years at all since they last met, Remus floundered with his lips. He licked them, sucked them in, parted them, all while dipping his head lower and lower in a submissive bow and turning a blood colored red. He had given up forcing his eyes to meet the in-control ones gazing at him in such a close proximity. There was a part of him that said such a thing as a kiss, such a mundane thing, would do him no more harm than a butterfly landing on his lips; would probably warm him up, but like small bugs and cigarettes, this thought was brushed beneath his heel.

If Remus had bothered to look up he would have seen a glimmer, a flicker like the flame of a lighter, phase right past Sirius' eyes, seen the softened look of a boy come man who knew discomfort, knew when he was the cause of the twitchy fingers and the rigid posture, and knew when to stop.

"Dinner?" Sirius asked in little more than a whisper, stepping back, with a grace Remus recognized, and slowly dropping his hand from Remus' cheek. 

Remus felt ruffled and incomparable to the size of his clothes, completely conquered by the fabrics folding and blowing around him. At the border line pitying expression on Sirius' face, his chest constricted into a narrow bundle of nerves like yarn. His cheeks, he realized with mild horror, would probably remain red after all of this blushing as a disgracing sign of his own shortcomings, even to his soulmate. 

"That'd be good." All the eloquence in the world mustered into one infallible phrase. Remus nearly rammed his head into the lamp post and left the cruel world right then in there, ending it all with a not so dignified whimper he fancied rather suitable for such a sublunary phrase.

"You know your hand would be warmer if it was in mine," a sweet little voice said right by his ear. Sirius had a grin of seduction that reached all the way to his twinkling eyes and suggestive eyebrows. If smiles were infectious then grins like these surely were a whole other kind of virus, mostly likely malignant, causing near fatal symptoms, like heart palpitations and restricted breathing, right away. Remus put on a matching grin with ease and stuck a hand out for Sirius to take, as if asking him to dance.

"Maybe not hopeless after all," Remus decided.

"Hopeless? I'm not hopeless! I'm so suave it's ridiculous."

"Ridiculous is definitely the right word."

A silence passed between them which could not be filled with all the things each wanted to say. Those things, however close to the crack of their lips, were too great for a moment so insignificant. So they tucked the words away for other quiet nights and dismal futures and took each other's hands.

*****

They sat on the curb, watching cars pass and pretending the sniveling man with the lazy eye and German accent didn't make them squirm on the inside with his disapproving gaze directed right at their conjoined fingers. Remus wiped his sweaty palm on the fabric of his pants, lifting his fingers awkwardly to avoid spreading wayward grease onto his trousers; he figured the tea stain was enough damage for one day. Sirius had already gotten a spectacular view of his inability to control his limbs when he fumbled and dropped a few coins on the floor of the little shop. As he squatted with the shame of someone who had experienced this moment a million times over, both in reality and in his waking nightmares, Sirius gave the man a crisp bill and instructed him to keep the change in an equally crisp voice. 

Now the cold didn't seem so bad, so bitter and pointed. Remus hoped maybe it would help cool his insides, stop them from melting halfway through the process. The silence wasn't so comfortable for him, but as Sirius flung another chip into the air and caught it in his mouth he figured it was only in his chaotic head.

The sweater was one of his more unfortunate choices, though not nearly as bad as the one Sirius had met him in. He had the urge to assure Sirius his fashion wasn't really so terrible, but he resisted for the sake of his pride, however small that may be. His mom had bought it for him as a Christmas gift last year. At the time a distinct understanding had passed through him and his father as the older man lifted an identical jumper from a smoldering wreckage of wrapping paper. They had silently negotiated with their eyes to wear it seemingly randomly, passing off turns once a month until the sweater was forgotten next to the fifteen foot, hand knitted, and slightly lopsided scarf and the family set of roller blades. Today was, unfortunately, Remus' day to uphold the bargain, a bargain which offered him little more than extra chocolate occasionally and a pinched smile from his dad, making him reconsider if it was even worth it in the first place.

"You cold any more?"

Remus almost blurted he was hot and bothered just sitting next to Sirius, but he again resisted for the sake of his slowly crumbling pride, "No. The food's warming me up."

Sirius had a very distinctive lip twitch that said he was inclined to say something that had been at the forefront of his mind during many restless nights and hollow evenings. 

"I..."

Remus nudged Sirius' foot with his own. His battered Converse were tearing at the seams, turning brown from mud and, he hoped deeply, not sweat. Compared to Sirius' very nice looking combat boots he felt slightly inadequate in the way white chocolate surely did to seventy percent dark chocolate when they sat next to each other on the shelf being gazed upon by condescending eyes.

"You?" Remus prompted.

In the next moment there were a variety of emotions over taking Sirius' face, all too fast and unreadable for Remus to make sense of, like he was trying on different masks and pretenses, before Sirius finally inhaled deeply, exhaling as if releasing all his bottled up anxieties as well, and pressed his palm to his cheek. 

"I have you figured out," he said at length.

"Oh yeah? What exactly have you figured out?" The tiny smile wavered and finally vanished from Remus' face entirely as his treacherous gaze wandered down to his chest. Sirius was staring with deep concentration at the moon, looking like he was searching for answers, the meaning of life or the reasons for soulmates or the reason for this particular soulmate.

"You named yourself and you were very insistent you were not a girl and you crossed your arms over your chest and you liked not being yourself when you read books."

Remus found himself resisting the urge, right then, to insecurely block the view of his chest with his arms. Instead, he brought his knees, with his paper basket of fish and chips balanced on the two pointed mountains, closer to his chest and hugged them there. The street lamp didn't help him feel like less of a spectacle, as it pooled its light in a circle around him.

"I was eleven. Subtlety wasn't something I mastered."

Sirius rubbed his shoulder on Remus' bicep in a way that shouldn't have felt so intimate for such a small action, shouldn't have felt like a giant shove into something he wasn't exactly prepared for, shouldn't have felt as exciting and uncharted as a first kiss. 

"I think you're very brave."

"I think I am too."

Remus took a measly bite of his now slightly soggy chip with effort. His chewing felt mechanic and the sidewalk below him very cold, seeping through his clothes, right to the core of his bones. It felt like a long, silent hour before a car rushed by without noticing them. He figured it was just as well, considering the puddle the car could easily swerve into and soak them both with a sludge like slug's slime.

"I have you figured out too, you know." 

At the clinical sounding nature of the statement, Sirius stopped chewing mid bite. There was a tangible trepidation in his slow mannerisms, eyeing Remus like a cautious animal, wary, Remus supposed, of emotions or betrayal or revealing himself so fully to a near stranger. That was something Remus could easily understand because it too had been ingrained in the every ligament of his bone ever since he had the audacity to be himself instead of who he was born as.

"I saw the bruise on your wrist and you got defensive about your parents and you didn't sound too fond of your mother." Remus inhaled deeply, hoping against hope his bluntness didn't break one of the clauses in their silent agreement. The way the air dropped and swayed around them made Remus feel as if he were open on the inside, hollow like a shell, getting his organs and secrets taken out of him with ginger care; he was sure Sirius was feeling it too.

"I ran away from my family. They were bad for me. Well except for my brother, Regulus, we were very close, but things happened and well... Anyway they were not the right people for me. I guess you know that. My best mate, James if you remember, took me in and now we're practically brothers."

"I remember. He taught you all the bad words you know. Never to be replaced."

Sirius gave a self deprecating chuckle and shook his head at his splayed fingers, examining each ring and bobbly knuckle until he had a perfect photo in his mind of exactly how they looked and exactly how Remus' voice etched itself into the slowly receding world around him, into his cracks and unscratched surfaces, like writing on a cave wall. His empty basket lay at his side, discarded, threatening to blow away in the wind. Remus wondered, off handedly, if the scar had anything to do with his parents and not a simple accident as he had first thought.

"Well he's more of a brother now so I'd say there's plenty of room for someone new."

"Good," Remus said in a small voice, barely loud enough to fill the silence, but just enough to get the other seventy million messages across he was really, really hoping Sirius would pick up on. 

"I... The reason I didn't come to see you was, well some summers my parents wouldn't let me over to James' because he was a bad influence, and then... I was scared. The day after I thought... I thought you were a dream and I psyched myself out. And then I tried to come around later but I got lost and I think I knocked on the wrong doors because when I asked for Remus everyone I asked looked confused or angry." Sirius attempted to heave a breath. "Please don't hate me. I was scared but I never forgot about you." Here, Sirius dipped his head down, looking more like an apologetic puppy than Remus realized a human could, looking for all the world like he was not a God any more, but a mere mortal asking for the Gods' forgivenesses. The wind did him the favor of blowing his long hair over his face like a veil, but this time Remus dared to draw the fringe back, and look into the eyes like storms or oceans or melting icecaps.

"I don't hate you. I was scared too. I was scared you would come and find me and realize we weren't soulmates somehow or that you didn't like me and then you'd just be stuck with me. I could have tried harder to find you."

Remus set aside his lukewarm supper and slipped himself closer, into Sirius' space. There was a moment of modest hesitation before a familiarly large and soft hand slipped around Remus' own in the way two puzzle pieces slid together so easily. Somehow, despite having never been close like this before, aside from awkward touching and fumbling with reality and each other's clunky hands, this all seemed like the most perfectly natural thing to do, the way things always were and were always to be, as if they were finally back where they belonged instead of just starting out that way. Remus knew his heart wasn't the only one playing like a harpsichord, knew with intense joy he wasn't the only one feeling wobbly in his own bones, right on up to the tips of his hair, knew with a relished sort of excitement that the obnoxious butterflies weren't just his own, knew infinity tangled around them like their limbs tangled together, knew Sirius' toying with his jacket zipper was a side of insecurity that was normally hidden behind a wall of leather and cigarettes and smirks.

"I'm glad we found each other."

Remus couldn't look at Sirius' lips any longer because they were making his dry and a little spasmy. Instead, he nestled into Sirius' side and pressed the top of his head into the crook of Sirius' neck, so he could easily smell cologne, they type his dad couldn't afford on his meager salary as a factory worker, and the fading ghost of the earlier cigarette and that static energy in the air between them, buzzing and alight in Remus' nose, crackling in such a thick density. A tentative arm wrapped itself around his back and squeezed him, pressing them together as if there was glue drying between them and they needed to be held close for it to stick. And inside Remus' chest a caged bird fluttered its wing and began to sing a soft melody that made his stomach weightless. 

He blinked slowly, aware Sirius now had his head on top of his own skull, chin tucked in the bundles of curls his mother fondly ruffled even to this day. He expelled quickly any thoughts of his mother from his brain as well as the pesky voices of the still ruthless peers. In that moment, and he hoped many moments after, there was only Sirius to guide him, like a compass or traversing map, and hold him close against the rocking waves of the ever crashing sea. The warmth between them spread like honey, dribbling down their bodies all the way to their toes with the excruciating joyousness of an approaching holiday season. As the cars zooming by sounded more like distant screams of long ago children neither had cared to meet, their thighs pressed and their sides slid against one another and each unraveled at the thought that this was actually a sector of reality reserved just for them. 

Remus hadn't felt so at home since he had lay nestled between his parents with a new name for the first time and a cat-who-ate-the-canary grin stretched across his face. He remembered his mother's lightly toying fingers brushing his hair from his forehand and the gentle up and down of his dad's steadily breathing chest where his cheek lay. In the moment with Sirius there was already the well worn warmth of fond memory crowding his senses.

"Now that we've got dinner out of the way it'd be alright if we kissed. If you like." Remus knew the vibration of his words shivered their way into Sirius' core, just like every tense muscle Remus could feel rippling against his side made a funny little lurch, like squeaking car breaks, happen beneath his ribs.

"If you'd like that," Sirius responded.

Sirius removed the point of his chin from Remus' scalp and Remus sat up, though not to his full height so he could just stare up into the orange tinted blue eyes, like a sunset reflecting over the surface of a lake, filled to the brim and far deeper with a new emotion more primal than anything so refined as a crush. For once Remus' lips didn't falter or tremble; they moved on a steady path aimed right at Sirius' mouth. It occurred to Remus, too close to impact to have anything done about it, that it might not be the best practice to kiss right in front of the shop of a blatant homophobe. It occurred to him in a flash and then all thought was replaced with a wave of overwhelming serenity as their lips met. His entire world was swallowed by Sirius. All the summers waiting and all the books read and re-read and every dashed hope became irrelevant, a far away past or another life entirely, because all there was and would ever be for the foreseeable future, was Sirius. 

The moment slipped in line easily with the other snapshots that defined his life. The night with his parents at his side like he knew they always would be, even if they had to call him a different name. The morning after attempting to explain to his fledgling friends the new circumstances only to be shown confusion. The night he read Alice in Wonderland beneath the stars, wishing, dreaming, when he fell asleep in between the words, he could be a part of that world too. The mid afternoon he shared with a sparkling boy who exuded confidence and beauty, a boy who shouldn't even care about a boy like him, a boy who gave him a world of colors as his only feeble, yet entirely too great, offering. The lunch period he told the pre-teen with the burly shoulders and oddly not so evil lip quiver to go fuck himself with more eloquence than he had ever managed to muster in the face of his bully. His every birthday and his every Christmas with light dustings of powdered sugar-like snow and humming and patient joy. And now this night with the tiny sparks bouncing between their electrically charged bodies and the smell of motor oil and leather and dusty old books blending in perfect antithesis as their lips held a conversation in a very alien language and breath was lost within each other.

Remus gasped as they separated. 

Sirius did not have anything in his eye—Remus knew because that's all he could look at, the completely clear pools of water wading in his eye sockets—and yet he blinked as if there was a bit of dust his eyelashes couldn't quite remove, "Would it be weird to say I think I'm falling in love with you?"

The words echoed between them for a second of uncertainty before Remus chuckled into the gap of their sides, the small gap that the robotic voice told you to mind on the tube, and shook his floppy hair.

"No. Not weird at all."

They both added, as a stipulation to their contract, that kissing was a requirement, a quota to be met each rendezvous, one which hadn't been met this time around. Each filed the contract away in the sections of their brains labeled for permanence and continual use, already feeling the edges of such a precious paper growing warn from fingering through such a magnanimous agreement.

"So it's alright if I kiss you again?" Sirius asked rather politely.

Remus cupped the cheek with his hand, though he knew his palm was probably freezing cold—the icy hand of death, on his temple and cheekbones—and pressed their lips together, never mind the bumping noses. And for a moment Remus let himself believe in the tug of the planets' alignment and the power of the constellations, especially the star called Sirius.

The End


End file.
